The Impossibility of Theology
The word of the Lord which came to Hosea the son of Beeri . . . Hosea 1:1a NASB
Which came – Maybe we should give this little investigation a different title. You see, theology is not impossible. Theology is rational thinking about God. Men have been doing theology since the first shaman priest discovered incantation. No, what’s impossible is a biblical theology. All the tomes on theology are religiously correct. They belong to the vast collection of material used to support some particular religious view. They are the architectural constructions of the paradigm of religion. But they are not what’s happening in the Bible. Insofar as they use biblical material to build their systems of thought, they extract from the Scripture artificial and abstract concepts necessary for justifying doctrine and dogma. But this is not what’s happening in the Bible. Theology is like using the property tax rolls to describe the ethos of a neighborhood. Correct, perhaps useful, but impossible.
Why is it impossible to construct a biblical theology? Because the Bible is a witness to revelation. It is not a description of that revelation. “As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.”
Do you understand what Heschel said? The Bible is midrash, that is, it is a collection of documents that “‘discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces,’ writes the Hebrew scholar Wilda C. Gafney. ‘They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions.’”[1] The Bible is a commentary on the event of a revelation. “This is why all the Bible does is to state that revelation happened; how it happened is something they could only convey in words that are evocative and suggestive.”[2]
“For us, therefore, to imagine revelation, namely, to conceive it as if it were a psychic or physical process, is to pervert its essence and to wreck its mystery. . . . However subtle and noble our concepts may be, as soon as they become descriptive, namely, definite, they confine Him and force Him into the triteness of our minds. Never is our mind so inadequate as in trying to describe God. The same applies to the idea of revelation. When defined, described, it completely eludes us.”[3]
Neo-orthodoxy was rejected by conservative evangelicals because its fundamental view of revelation was that the Bible contained the word of God but was not in itself the word of God. But neo-orthodoxy didn’t go far enough. That the Bible contains God’s word is obvious, but those words are the midrash of prophetic revelation, that is, they are attempts to elicit response, to hint at a far greater reality, to open the window on the majesty of the existence of everything. As such, the Bible reimagines, explores, extrapolates, reconnects God’s interactions and man’s responses to words, wonders and signs. It links God and man in poetic forms, even if those poetic forms seem to be narrative, legislation or proclamation. For this reason, a biblical theology is unimaginable. It is, as Wittgenstein would say, a “category mistake.”
Topical Index: theology, Bible, revelation, Hosea 1:1
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrash
[2] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 77.
[3] Ibid., p. 78.
